Pale as Death Read online

  She slipped gloves on before taking the envelope. Still, it had been in the mailroom, it had been delivered to a secretary, it had been on his desk, not to mention the fact that it had gone through the post office.

  “He mailed it from the same place he mailed Lili’s license, I’m sure,” Sophie said. “But we’ll get this back, and then...”

  “Hopefully, Jackson will have received something from Angela by now. Although, Sabrina Hayes might have what we need, too.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I don’t think she does. Unless she’s in on it, somehow. She wanted the police there—for trespassers and vandals, yes, but... Bruce, maybe—”

  “We’ll check on unsolved murders in the past few years.” He was quiet. “Bobby Dougherty says that the man may have killed in other places. He didn’t. We know through Ann Marie that he has been using the church and burial ground. Whether the bodies were found or not, he started murdering at the graveyard. Maybe, if we can find his other victims...”

  “Can we get Angela started on that? Or should we try here? Here’s where we would have the reports.”

  “Don’t worry. Angela can access anything.”

  “In that case, can you reach Jackson?”

  “Of course. We can just—”

  “Stop by the hospital.”

  “After I drop the envelope.”

  “After you drop the envelope.”

  She hesitated. “Bruce, what do you think? Does this point toward—toward Henry again? He is the one who took the pictures.”

  “He’s right, though—a hell of a lot of people had access to them.”

  “But he is...a bit off.”

  “Doesn’t make him a murderer. But, yes, I say he remains on the list.”

  “A list of one,” Sophie muttered.

  They dropped the envelope at the police lab and headed to the hospital.

  Vining was being a difficult patient; he wanted to be discharged.

  When they arrived, Jackson Crow was there—and he was patiently listening as Vining grumbled.

  He so wanted out.

  The captain, however, wasn’t clearing him for duty; the doctors had said that he needed another day or two.

  “Ridiculous!” Vining announced. “And I’ve heard about the rag mag posting the pictures. Deplorable! What is the matter with people? You’ve been to the paper, right?”

  “Yes,” Sophie said.

  “And?”

  “Came in an envelope. I already have it back with our forensic team.”

  Vining nodded.

  “I wish to hell I could get out of here!”

  “Grant, you will. I swear to God, we’re working as hard as we can,” Sophie told him.

  “I know, I know... Special Agent Crow keeps me up-to-date...wait, you are sleeping, right?”

  “I’m sleeping,” Sophie assured him.

  Jackson spoke up. “You’ll receive plans from the church and the burial ground within the hour. Angela has managed to get them through the years—up to the last interment.”

  “A massive crew has already been through the church and the burial ground,” Vining said.

  “There was a quake that caused some damage—and some changes—in the 1920s,” Jackson said. He glanced at Vining. “It may mean nothing, it may mean something,” he said evenly. “Brodie is taking over from me again in a few hours. McFadden, I’ll meet you at Sophie’s place.”

  Bruce nodded. “Can you get Angela working on something else?” he asked.

  “You’ve got something?” Vining asked.

  Bruce was glad that Bobby Dougherty had spoken about other victims at the meeting. He could say what he needed—and keep Vining in on what they were doing.

  “Bobby Dougherty—the forensic psychiatrist—doesn’t believe that the killer started with our present two victims. I want to see what other unsolved murders might be on the books, or, maybe, missing persons.”

  “This is LA. Dreamers come out here...and give up, go home, move onward... We do wind up with a lot of missing person reports,” Vining said.

  “And we’ll do what we can.”

  “We have a hell of a database,” Jackson assured him.

  Vining was quiet for a minute. “Of course,” he said, “I know that Bobby Dougherty announced this to the whole force, but...keep your inquiries FBI for the moment.”

  “All right,” Bruce said.

  Vining, too, was apparently growing more and more suspicious.

  It wasn’t making him happy. But he was a good cop. And good cops had to face the truth, whether they liked it or not.

  * * *

  “People are buried on top of people, and more people are buried on top of them,” Sophie murmured.

  She’d printed out all the plans that Angela had sent them, spreading the pages across the surface of her desk in her home office. It was amazing to see what had been—and what was now. Over time, gravestones had been moved. People lay in the ground—but nowhere near the place where their markers stood.

  A quake had hit the LA basin on June 21, 1920. It had been a 4.9, but caused some major damage in several places.

  While the church had stood well enough, the foundation had been shaken. It had been shored up, partially filled in.

  A number of the priests had been interred in the foundation area; their remains had been removed and reinterred beneath the altar.

  Another interesting fact that Sophie hadn’t realized came clear in the old plans. Many of the little mausoleums and family vaults had more extensive catacomb areas beneath. The tomb where she’d been seated, for one. Another that belonged to a Wisdom family, and several others, though they weren’t quite as large.

  Excited, Sophie called over to Bruce, who was working on missing person cases and unsolved murders. He walked over to where she sat at her desk, and looked over her shoulder. “Underground!” she said. “He has these plans...he’s had these plans. He’s using the burial ground, we know that! And if we go by the earthquake of 1920 and all the work that went on after... Bruce! We can find where he’s working. We can find his torture chamber or whatever it is he uses. He doesn’t care if there’s blood there, he knows that not even the people who run the church know about all this!”

  “We’ve another problem, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s washing the bodies. Where is he getting the water?”

  Sophie looked at him. “Um, most graveyards have a water source. They have spigots for people for the flowers they bring their loved ones.”

  “Did you see any?”

  “No, but I wasn’t looking. And there’s so much foliage around—there’s probably a hose, and—”

  “Sophie, if he dragged a corpse out into the burial ground and washed it there, he’d be...if not seen by the living, he would have been seen by the dead.”

  “Then he has a way of bringing the water down. That’s the only answer, Bruce. Okay, from what we know from Ann Marie, he murdered before. Up to three other women. I think they were practice victims; I think this guy has lived with the dream of repeating the Dahlia murder for a long time—and that he’s ecstatic because he’s managed it twice. We have all these leads, all these things that we can do, clues to follow...but they send us reeling in circles. That’s what he’s wanted. At first, he practiced getting women to the burial ground. Auditions! And sure, explain that it’s going to be a project like an old Greek tragedy—or whatever—and an actress must be able to emote behind a mask. She has to be able to play off him while he’s wearing a mask. Bruce, I’ve spent my life out here—I have so many friends who are actors... I know a lot about what’s legitimate, what’s just odd, and what kind of thing can be used to snare the unwary—and those who are ambitious and naive.”

  “I believe you. I have no problem following your theory, your me
thods—and the killer’s madness. Jackson will get us in. We can arrange for it tomorrow. Tonight, I think we should follow through with the Hollywood Hooligan performance. Perhaps another discussion with Kenneth—and his players. We’re the only ones who know about the masks at the moment, but if what Ann Marie was seeing were theatrical masks...”

  “I think we should see Kenneth before the show,” Sophie said. “Kenneth Trent really should know who had the masks—and if any went missing.”

  “I’ll tell him we’re coming out to the performance,” Bruce said. “And that I need a minute with him. All right?”

  “All right,” Sophie agreed. She’d become so excited over the churchyard plans, she’d forgotten to ask how he was doing.

  He walked back to his laptop, picked it up and showed Sophie a picture. It was of a pretty young woman with shoulder-length, curling dark hair.

  An actress’s head shot.

  She looked a lot like Brenda Sully.

  And a lot like Lili Montana.

  And the Black Dahlia.

  “Who is she?”

  “Judith Lawry. She came to LA ten years ago. And disappeared into thin air.”

  Sophie asked him, “No body?”

  “Her body was never found. She was never found. She just disappeared. Her family lives in Kansas City, Missouri—or did. Her mother passed away about eight years ago, and her father followed a year later. According to detective notes, her mother was passionate, calling constantly. But she had been in a hotel and checked out the day she disappeared. The detectives on the case had nowhere to go. She hadn’t told anyone she was doing anything specific. She left the hotel, and she was seen by the counter clerk—and then never again. Her picture was posted everywhere. No one ever came forward with any information on her whatsoever.”

  “She might have been the first victim,” Sophie said.

  “Or she might have hitchhiked or hopped a bus out of town, and anything might have happened. But yes...” He hesitated. “Sadly, the LA morgue gets all kind of John and Jane Does. You have a population like this, and...” He shrugged.

  “Bruce, if this guy did start ten years ago, he’d be...well, probably older now. I’m not a behavioral scientist by any mean, and yet I read a lot, and I know that such killers tend to be in their twenties or early thirties, and they’re often loner types, and some with menial jobs... And yet, if he killed ten years ago, he wouldn’t be twenties or early thirties now.”

  “He still could be fairly young. Many serial killers start at early ages. We’ve all heard that you have to watch out for kids who cut off lizards’ tails, throw rocks at fenced dogs, and maybe graduate to killing cats. But there have also been cases of kids killing kids—and killing adults, as well.”

  “But he would have pretended to be a director or a producer. Could someone young have pulled that off?” Sophie wondered.

  “I think he would have had to have been seventeen or so at the time. I’ve seen plenty of seventeen-year-olds—male and female—who can pull off appearing to be pretty mature.” He paused. “Jesse Pomeroy.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Way back—Boston 1870s. Jesse Pomeroy was twelve years old when he was first apprehended. He started out torturing a number of children, stripping them naked, binding then, cutting them—broke one’s jaw. He went to a reform school. He was let out. And then he killed. Age doesn’t necessarily make a kid sweet and cuddly.”

  “We’re back to the fact that we just don’t know yet.”

  Sophie was frustrated.

  There was a knock on Sophie’s front door—and a quick little buzz from the bell.

  She was embarrassed that she jumped at the sudden sound.

  Bruce pretended not to notice. “Jackson, I’m sure,” he said. “I’ll go get him.”

  When Bruce came back, he took up a perch on Sophie’s desk. Jackson took the one other chair in the office.

  “I have something for you—it will be in those files, but Vining brought it to my attention.”

  “What?”

  “Six years ago. Stella Greenwood. She was found in the tar pits. Her throat had been slashed. She was from Montgomery, Alabama, just out here a week—she wanted to be a star. She was a foster child, so she went missing without anyone paying attention. A hotel manager called the cops when she didn’t pay up. Her body was found before the poor girl even became a missing person case.”

  “So, we may have victim one—and victim two. And if so, and if that’s all...he went four years between crimes,” Bruce said.

  “Vining had the case. You were still in patrol, Sophie,” Jackson told her.

  “I do remember it, though. So sad. No one cared. We took up a collection—I remember that, because I contributed,” Sophie said. She gasped. “Oh! Her body was...well, she’d been in the tar. But when they got her cleaned up, death was by a hit on the head—some kind of blunt object. But...she’d also been mutilated.”

  “Her face had been ripped up,” Jackson said. “I think our killer was practicing.”

  “Do we have a third?”

  “I believe our third is also going to be a missing person,” Bruce said, studying an email Angela had sent that was up on his phone screen. “There are a lot of maybes—but I think we have more than a maybe here. Maggie McAvoy. She was out here a year—she told everyone she was going to be in the movies. She’d call home now and then, and then she just stopped. Her roommate called the police, concerned, when she’d disappeared for a week. She’d had a fight with Maggie—over drugs. Maggie wasn’t paying her share of the rent or the bills—and she was, according to the roommate—paying for drugs. She was working—she’d been able to get extra work and be paid as an audience member for a number of pilots and game shows. But according to her roommate, she’d also gotten into drugs. So police hunted down dealers and anyone else. No one could find anything at all on Maggie.” He looked up at them. “She was last seen at the bar across the street from the church and the burial ground. Crusty’s. And,” he added, “she disappeared—according to her roommate—exactly a year ago, last Monday.”

  “How could anyone get away with so much?” Sophie asked. “I mean, if we’re thinking it might be a cop, working every day with other cops...”

  “It’s possible. Bundy worked for a crisis center,” Bruce reminded her.

  She glanced at Jackson. “He does know his serial killers.”

  “Frightening, yes, but sadly, so do we all,” Jackson said. “So, we think we may have found where our guy started. Do you feel that we’re any closer?”

  “Yes—and no,” Bruce said.

  “Want to see a show?” Sophie asked.

  “The Hollywood Hooligans?” Jackson asked.

  “We have to see Kenneth Trent again,” Bruce explained. “We got a tip about masks, that the killer might wear one, but...well, the forensic psychiatrist didn’t come up with that one.”

  “I see,” Jackson murmured. “A ghost?”

  Bruce nodded. “I told you about Ann Marie.”

  Sophie added, “I announced the performance today. I want to see exactly who does show up. I’m willing to bet that we will see Henry Atkins. And others, perhaps. Others I work with every day.” She trembled slightly, not afraid, but definitely disturbed. She looked at Bruce and Jackson. “Friends,” she added softly. “Friends—who may be savage psychopaths.”

  14

  Saturday night

  The Dunston Inn had been built in the 1920s to host the stars of the silent-movie era. When talkies had come in, the Dunston Inn had hosted the new stars.

  The building had been designed in the Deco style, with clean, handsome arches abounding. Fixtures were elegant, chandeliers were sumptuous, and the lobby—where show-goers arrived—was large and welcoming, offering comfortable wingback chairs and numerous chesterfield sofas.

  The check-in coun
ter was for ticket sales that night; the friendly young redhead who sold Bruce the tickets to the performance told him that he was lucky—there had only been four left for the evening. “We never sell more than a hundred!” she said. “The performances are interactive. You can actually see the same show with the Hollywood Hooligans several times—and have a different experience every time. Of course, if you have friends, or want to come again, this show will last four weekends—or four Saturdays and Sundays.”

  Bruce thanked her and asked if he could see Kenneth Trent.

  The girl was surprised.

  “He’s here, right?” Bruce asked.

  “Oh, yes, he is...he’s here. He gives his performers last-minute notes before the show. Perhaps you could see him after the performance.”

  “I’d really love to see him now,” Bruce said, producing his private investigator’s license. It didn’t actually grant him the same rights as other law enforcement, but it seemed to work everywhere.

  “Oh!” the girl said. Then she sighed. “All right. He’s in the kitchen. I can’t lead you to him, I’m alone out here at the moment. But—”

  “I can find my way,” Bruce assured her.

  She hesitated again. “Okay. The elevators over there are the first step for our guests. There are four floors, and as they arrive, guests are escorted off at different floors. You’ll see. You really are here for the performance, right?” There was a slight edge to her voice then.

  “Yes, we’re really here for the performance.”

  “Sorry.” She offered her hand suddenly. “I’m Madge. And I’m heartbroken about Lili, but you have to understand, Kenneth works so hard! And if she had just been...well, just been happy being a Hooligan, I think she’d still be with us.”

  At first, Bruce thought that Madge was cold. Very cold.

  But then he saw the tears in her eyes.

  Lili was dead.

  But apparently, the old adage was true.

  The show—this show, at least—must go on.

  He realized he was being cynical. Lili Montana was dead—hardly cold. These people were her coworkers.